All posts tagged User Interface

At long last, we’re finally back with a new edition of ‘Jon rambles for too long about some esoteric game design topic (and along the way mentions AtG once or twice)’. Today’s lucky recipient of this most distinguished spotlight is the game’s user interface, or “UI”. I know this topic might sound roughly as exciting as watching paint dry, but I really do encourage you to stick around because once you’ve seen things with your own eyes I think you’ll understand why our bold claim of AtG’s UI being “revolutionary” isn’t just pre-release marketing hype.

It may also come as a relief that this update is actually a 3-for-1 deal where ‘Jon waxing poetically about his eternal love for UI and the beautiful soul it hides from the big, bad world’ is reinforced by two additional features.

The second member of our update trifecta is a fairly detailed bullet point outline of what’s new and cool with AtG’s UI, and provides the most bang for your buck if you only have a couple minutes to spare. I’ve attached it to the end of this article, so to check it out just scroll to the very bottom of this article and then back up until you see “UI Feature Outline” in big, bold text.

The real the star of our show though is this hands-on video preview of the UI (total of 66 minutes, split into 2 parts roughly a half hour long):

The old “seeing is believing” mantra sums up UI perfectly, and so much so that even a designer and UI fanboy like me can’t do it justice simply by describing it. So even if you don’t normally watch game videos I strongly encourage checking this one out. If you’re in a hurry skip ahead to the 11-minute mark, as that’s when we introduce AtG’s secret weapon.

The rest of this article makes up the final member of our trifecta, and is a dive deep into a number of UI-related topics that include: why good UI has never been (and never will be) the kind of ‘sexy’ bullet point that helps sell magazines, why in spite of that developers should still care, what makes UI design so difficult, where the idea for AtG’s Adaptive Tooltips came from, some of our UI design ‘rules’, and a look at the design process behind a few UI features we’ve put a lot of thought into so that players won’t have to.

User interface in games is a subject very near and dear to my heart. If I couldn’t be a game designer for whatever reason I would probably be a UI or graphic designer. The way screen elements are laid out is crucial in both educating new users and empowering veterans who want as little as possible between them and the info or result they’re after.

In this article I’ll share a number of UI guidelines that I’ve accumulated over the years. A lot of this information will be nothing new to anyone who’s done professional UI before, but I hope everyone finds it useful and/or entertaining regardless!

Much of what I talk about is pertinent only to the strategy genre or other types of games that have complex UIs (typically PC titles). Someone designing a first-person-shooter will still come away with a few useful tidbits, but they’d be hard-pressed to get much out of button placement suggestions when their game has no on-screen buttons!